Every credit union leader knows they need a data strategy. But knowing you need one and building one that actually delivers results are two different challenges entirely.

The credit unions achieving breakthrough results—like the $1 billion in growth American Heritage Credit Union generated in just 18 months—aren’t necessarily smarter or better funded. They’re simply executing differently. They’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and how to avoid the costly missteps that stall data initiatives before they gain momentum.

Here’s your practical roadmap for formulating a data strategy that drives measurable impact.

The Do's: Building for Success

DO Start with High-Impact Quick Wins

The “big bang” approach, like trying to transform everything at once, is where data strategies go to die. Instead, identify one high-impact process that matters to your bottom line: loan onboarding, marketing analytics, or cross-sell optimization. Deliver meaningful results in that area within 90 days. Early success builds institutional confidence and momentum that carries the entire initiative forward.

You don’t need to solve everything immediately. You need to prove the concept with tangible wins that demonstrate value.

Launch Credit Union took this approach with their incentive tracking program. Rather than overhauling everything at once, they automated one critical manual process and eliminated 480 hours of management labor annually. That early win built confidence for expanding into additional modules.

DO Build Cross-Departmental Buy-In from Day One

Data strategy isn’t an IT project; it’s an institutional transformation. Every department needs data, which means every department should have representation in both the foundation and delivery.

Here’s the reality: 95% of financial institutions report that data is broken up in silos. That means critical information that one part of your institution has about your customers isn’t being shared with another part. It’s like having three mechanics working on the same car without talking to each other. You’re going to drain the wrong fluid.

Executives need daily financial visibility, not just quarterly reports. Front-line staff need complete customer relationships in real-time. Managers need performance metrics that enable proactive coaching. Lending teams need pipeline visibility. When everyone has skin in the game from the start, you avoid the fatal mistake of treating this as purely a technical implementation.

DO Integrate, Don't Just Aggregate

Remember the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark? They spent the whole movie fighting over this incredibly valuable artifact, and it just ends up in a warehouse, never to be found again. That’s because it wasn’t integrated with the overall war strategy.

The same thing happens with data. Financial institutions spend money putting data into a warehouse, but if you’re not integrating those different data sources with each other, you’re just creating an expensive graveyard. Your data needs to work together—core systems, lending platforms, digital banking, card systems, marketing tools—all connected into one real-time, queryable foundation.

American Heritage Credit Union understood this. They moved beyond siloed systems to create a unified data ecosystem where every department could access complete customer information. The result? A 25% increase in household cross-sell and $1 billion in growth over 18 months.

DO Anchor Around Your Institution's Mission

Generic data strategies produce generic results. A community bank focused on agricultural lending will need fundamentally different insights than an urban credit union serving first-time homebuyers. Your data strategy should reflect your unique value proposition and strategic priorities.

Start by measuring what actually matters to your mission: churn rates, cross-sell effectiveness, share-of-wallet, customer profitability, employee efficiency, and marketing campaign attribution to opened products. These metrics define your starting point and your ROI.

DO Establish Strong Governance Before You Scale

Without proper governance, bad data spreads like a virus. It duplicates, degrades, and infects your reports until leaders stop trusting the numbers entirely. And here’s a sobering statistic: only 17% of industry leaders say their current data strategy is effective. We’d argue it might be even lower than that.

Establish a governance committee that includes representation from across the enterprise and not just IT. Define data ownership, accountability, and validation processes from the start. Governance isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the foundation of trust that makes everything else possible.

DO Align Incentives with Adoption

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you won’t get adoption without alignment. If you want your data strategy to succeed, connect it to goals and incentives. Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.

Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union automated their cross-sell tracking and incentive calculations, eliminating the weekly manual process of spreadsheets and email approvals. The result wasn’t just efficiency; it was adoption. When staff can see their performance daily and know they’ll be paid accurately for their efforts, they engage with the system.

The Don'ts: Avoiding Costly Missteps

DON'T Treat This as Purely Technical

The biggest mistake credit unions make is treating data activation as an IT implementation. Here’s what happens: everything data-related gets funneled through the IT department, including reporting and access to information needed by frontline staff. IT quickly becomes overallocated, creating a bottleneck that slows everything down.

Technology is essential, but transformation requires organizational change management. If your data initiative lives exclusively in IT, you’ve already limited its potential impact.

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DON'T Try to Boil the Ocean

Analysis paralysis is real. Credit unions drown in dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports while members wait for solutions. According to recent studies, only 15% of FIs say their data is currently being used to enhance customer experience. Think about that. You have this goldmine of information about how to serve your members effectively, and you’re not leveraging it.

Focus on insights that tie directly to strategic goals: growth, efficiency, intelligence, and member empowerment. The goal isn’t more reports. The goal is smarter, faster decisions.

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DON'T Ignore End User Adoption

When data projects fail, lack of end user adoption is consistently identified as one of the top reasons. You can have the best data warehouse in the world, but if your staff isn’t using it or doesn’t know how to use it, you’ve wasted your investment.

Build training into your implementation plan. Make the tools intuitive. And critically, demonstrate value early so people want to use them. When PSECU streamlined their cross-sell process, managers could approve incentives with a few clicks instead of sifting through weekly spreadsheet emails. That’s the kind of tangible improvement that drives adoption.

DON'T Underestimate Customization Needs

Every financial institution is different. You’ve got different goals, different culture, different members you’re serving. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. Your data platform needs to be configurable to your specific ecosystem of vendors, flexible enough to adapt to your unique processes, and scalable enough to grow with you.

DON'T Forget Cost vs. Value

If you don’t execute well on data integration, end user adoption, and customization, honestly, any cost you spend isn’t going to be effective. You’re better off not doing it at all than doing it poorly. But when done right, the ROI is undeniable. Launch Credit Union saves 60+ days of manual labor annually. TruMark Financial generated $167 million in new mortgage revenue. These aren’t theoretical benefits. They’re measurable outcomes from credit unions that executed correctly.

The Road Ahead

The average U.S. financial institution operates over 200 vendor systems. Your data strategy must account for this reality, not fight it. Modern data architectures can connect cores, digital banking, lending, card, and marketing systems into one real-time foundation while delivering performance at a fraction of traditional costs.

The institutions that win are those that connect their systems, activate their data, and empower every team with actionable intelligence.

But here’s the critical question: Are you going to spend 2026 debating how to become data-driven, or are you going to spend it executing?

The difference between these two groups isn’t luck or budget. It’s execution. Follow these do’s and don’ts, start with quick wins that prove value, build governance frameworks that enable sustainable scale, and align every department around shared goals.

Ready to Activate Your Data Strategy?

Some credit unions will spend another year in analysis paralysis. Others will achieve breakthrough results like the institutions we’ve highlighted here.

Which one will you be?

Let’s transform scattered information into strategic intelligence that drives growth.

We’ll make a plan to get you there.

Formulating Your Data Strategy: The Do’s & Don’ts